


It's the Beginning of a New Age

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: 1970s, AU where Aziraphale knows the Velvet Underground isn't bebop, M/M, New York City, Oblivious Pining, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Punk, References to Drugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 10:28:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19207519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: In August 1970, Aziraphale and Crowley attend one of the Velvet Underground's final shows at Max's Kansas City.





	It's the Beginning of a New Age

** Lower East Side  
August 1970 **

\--

He was where he was wont to be, all things considered: in a dark corner. He looked rather like he hadn’t since at least 3000 BC. Aziraphale went over and touched his narrow shoulder, which faintly sparked against the palm of his hand. “You’ve long hair again,” he said, delightedly, when Crowley turned. 

He was expert now at reading the face without eyes. The crease of the brow above the sunglasses, which were fingerprinted and cracking bright yellow Bakelite, refracting the dim bare bulbs descending from the ceiling. “What in hell are you doing here,” Crowley said. His American accent — Aziraphale remembered this from New Mexico, 1885 — made everything he said sound mean. Even if he didn’t mean it, which he didn’t. 

“You do know they send me after you. Wherever you stir up trouble.” 

“You should’ve been here last year,” said Crowley. “We had a cracking good time upstate.”

“Americans don’t say that.”

“Say what?”

“ _Cracking good time_.”

“Don’t they? Anyway you can’t be talking to me, dressed like you are. You’ll blow my cover.”

“Perhaps that’s exactly what I’m here to do.” 

Crowley ignored this; he already knew it, and anyway didn’t care, and had probably already blown his cover saying things like _cracking good time_. “Go in the toilets and miracle yourself some real clothes,” he said. 

“Only if you get me a drink.”

“Fine. Vodka tonic?”

“I’ve actually been rather enjoying negronis lately — ”

“This is Max’s, angel,” Crowley said, “you can’t order a bloody negroni. They’ll tar and feather you and run you out of town.” 

They split for opposite sides of the club. Aziraphale was obliged to miracle himself to the front of the line for the toilets and then to conduct further miraculous acts to speed along completion for the couple obviously copulating in the single stall. He hated having to do things like this and so took care to make sure neither of the partners involved would soon forget the raw heavenly power of this tryst. It was exceedingly unfortunate, he thought, perhaps most unfortunate of all, even given everything, the way angels and humans alike tended to forget that after all it was god who made bodies with all the good-feeling bits included. After all, he didn’t have those, and the pat explanations from the corner office that he “didn’t need them” or “had something different” just seemed patronizing. 

In Aziraphale’s opinion, which he usually only gave when he was good and drunk and as such only to Crowley, his side had doomed itself in the initial crafting of the “deadly sins,” a project in which he of course had not been involved. 

Eventually the couple stumbled out and Aziraphale went in. There was no mirror and no seat on the toilet, and there were condom wrappers and used needles everywhere, tucked in the gap between wall and floor. He recognized these from London and knew you weren’t supposed to touch them lest you stick yourself. Crowley didn’t like drugs himself (or so he claimed) but he liked giving people drugs, or at least he was well convinced of the efficacy of this project when it came to converting humans to the ways of sin. There was no trash can to miracle the needles into so he disappeared them, then immediately regretted it, because he wasn’t sure where he’d disappeared them to. He quickly changed his outfit (perhaps it was a little dated, the last time he had observed fashionable people in New York being in the late 1950s, in a jazz club where one of god’s most musically anointed performed weekly) and went back into the club. Crowley was over in his dark corner again. “That’s a little better,” he said, pushing the drink into Aziraphale’s hand. It wouldn’t necessarily be accurate to call it a vodka soda, given it was mostly if not entirely vodka. 

“Are you still a drug dealer?” Aziraphale asked him, having also been thinking about it in context of the jazz player, who he was pretty sure Crowley had gotten by those means. 

Crowley was used to these rapid turns of conversation. “No. Or well, not anymore. I used to — up until maybe five years ago. Then the humans got much better than me, so there was really no point anymore.” 

“Hmm.”

“Your side created them with their... woeful tendency toward addiction.” 

“One could argue yours exploited it.” 

“Can addiction ever be a heavenly thing? One could argue you created it to be exploited.”

“I didn’t create anything!”

“I know. You’ve reminded me of that however many times…” 

“So what are you doing here then?”

Crowley looked past him toward the stage. “I’m here to see the Velvet Underground,” he said. 

“You know what I mean. What are you really doing here?” 

“I can’t just go to a club to see some music without ulterior motives?”

“You never have done anything without ulterior motives,” Aziraphale said bitterly. 

“If I haven’t,” Crowley reminded him, “neither have you.” 

Aziraphale huffed, downed the rest of the vodka, pivoted to face the tiny stage. The growing crowd pressed them together in the tiny room. He had been trapped in a coffin with Crowley before (again, New Mexico, 1885) but he was fairly certain he didn’t remember Crowley’s hair smelling like cannabis and patchouli. He hadn’t had so much hair then, either. Now it was rather artfully arranged in a haphazard way befitting those cursed modernists and Aziraphale thought if it weren’t for all the black clothes Crowley was wearing, always wore, he might’ve been mistaken for what he had perhaps looked like as an angel. Not that they had known each other then. Probably wouldn’t have been friends had they known each other then. Aziraphale had been a brand new being, only occasionally embodied, and even then only allowed to appear in the itchy many-eyed eldritch eye-form like a neon jellyfish or an undulating lighthouse lens. He had been very preoccupied with the disastrous consequences accompanying the inevitability of his doing something wrong. Never mind those were days before right and wrong necessarily existed. The young Crowley and his cohort, of course, had been instrumental in the definition of that binary. 

“What,” said Crowley. Aziraphale realized he had been staring. “Can you see my eyes?” 

“I only like your hair like this. It’s been forever.” 

“Couple thousand years. I don’t know. It’s really heavy.” 

“It suits you.” 

Crowley passed a hand through it, as though he wasn’t thinking, but of course he was, showing the mark beside his ear. 

“This whole place suits you,” Aziraphale said. “This whole time.” 

“Yes. Much better than the — ”

“Than the fourteenth century. I know. I suppose I ought to have enjoyed that more. But at the time I was rather preoccupied.” 

“With Dante?”

“Heavens. Haven’t heard his name in years. But no, with the relics, you know, the shroud of Turin and all the like — people selling just random bits of rags and bone.” 

“I forgot about that. What a disaster.” 

“And the food was horrible. Just horrible.” 

Crowley shifted his hair again. “Was a terrible time to be a demon,” he said, altogether too loudly. Though it was likely nobody in the club would do anything about it if they heard. “People were really looking out. Of course they only succeeded in killing their own, most of the time.”

“You nearly got doused with holy water in Nimes,” Aziraphale recalled. Briefly remembered shoving him out of the way. The resultant soaking, which of course to an angel felt just fine, kind of pleasant even, except for that it was frigid cold out. That was the closest he had yet come to seeing Crowley destroyed. He had been deeply frightened, though he would’ve denied it then. Afterward had gone and gotten raving drunk on mead, which he had never done again after that owing to the worst hangover of his life. Evidently the almighty could not have made their bodies without the bad-feeling parts, he reasoned bitterly. 

“Yes,” Crowley remembered, “was a near thing. This is altogether a much better time to be a demon.” 

“What do you think it is about it?”

The trick was just to get him talking and keep him talking. Usually his motives could be sussed out in the course of a rousing bout of spirited debate. 

“I think you’ll find your side stands for a certain rigid social order,” Crowley said delightedly. “People are looking for an alternative.” 

“And you have the alternative in the form of damnation?”

“Perhaps damnation is worth — being allowed to truly live in your human lifetime.”

“Is it?”

“Well, if you really ask me, I don’t think so, but some disagree. But humans can be convinced it is. After all there isn’t an exact guarantee of afterlife, is there?”

“Of course there is — !”

“You lot have always been rather cagey on that.”

Aziraphale pivoted again, this time linguistically, to escape this line of conversation. “Your American accent is hopeless,” he said. “You keep spouting these ridiculous Britishisms.” 

Crowley smirked. “You never like talking about that, do you.”

“I most certainly do not.”

“You really ought to give people a sign.” 

“So should you!”

“If we gave people a sign,” Crowley said sadly, “we’d never get anyone. But then neither would you. Heaven being… as you’ve described. The truth is, life is probably the best of all three.”

“How could you say such a thing!” Aziraphale announced, as though he didn’t agree. As though Crowley didn’t know he agreed. When you knew somebody for such a long time, sometimes you had to lie solely for purposes of continued conversation. And they had been having this conversation since roughly the first century AD. 

“Wait til the band comes on. You’ll see.”

“God. Last I heard you say that was right before we saw the Rite of Spring.”

“And?”

Aziraphale had cried. Crowley had long denied he was capable of shedding tears, but he had had sunglasses on, and afterward, on the street, he didn’t talk for a few minutes, and then his voice was a little rough, though he had seen the ballet performed before at its debut in Paris and claimed to have started the riot that ensued. 

“You were right about the Rite of Spring,” said Aziraphale begrudgingly. 

“I’m right about the Velvets too,” Crowley said. “You’ll see. They’re the foundation of the century.”

“It’s 1970.” 

“You know what I mean. It’s a shame they’ll have to break up.” 

“Wait — what?”

“I’ll have to convince Lou to leave the band. But it shouldn’t be too hard, now that John’s quit.”

“You just said they were foundational to the century.”

“Yes, of course, if they stop now. I know how these things work. What do you think might’ve happened had Schubert not died at 31?”

“You didn’t have something to do with that!”

“Well, inasmuch as I didn’t do everything I could’ve done — everything _you_ might’ve done — to stop the spread of syphilis…” 

Aziraphale crossed his arms tightly across his chest. It was hot in the club and — the almighty having not made these bodies without the bad-feeling parts — he had sweat through the underarms of his beige wool button-down. Onstage someone was checking the amplification systems by repeatedly strumming a single chord on a ravaged black guitar. The first time he had ever gone to a rock music concert, he’d thought this strange ritual was a kind of experimental performance and had embarrassed himself deeply in front of his bridge club. “There was a memo about that, actually,” he told Crowley. “We’re not supposed to say anything about… venereal… ailments.” 

“Of course not. You’re hardly supposed to say anything about anything.” 

“That’s not — ” 

The house lights pulled down like a cloud passing over the sun, and Crowley’s sharp elbow jabbed Aziraphale’s gut. He’d done this before the Rite of Spring too. The crowd shifted ecstatically forward and they moved with it. Angels really did not comport themselves like this — all this touching. Perhaps demons did, but he had never asked Crowley about it. 

An unassuming man came on stage to the tune of the crowd’s wild howling. He was slender and delicate with large, sympathetic features. “That’s Lou,” Crowley said, grinning. Sometimes he seemed to possess this childlike elation. Aziraphale remembered being introduced to Leonardo da Vinci around the year 1500. Lou was joined presently by the rest of the band. They were all quite scrappy and wearing black. Quite a far cry from the days when music was performed in grand halls and everybody was wearing tuxedos and gowns and wigs and — women and men alike — thick white powder foundation made in part from lead. Crowley was applauding wildly with the rest of the crowd. He turned to Aziraphale, smile verging on the sinister, as it tended to in his moments of purest joy, which, of course, were usually sinister moments. Maybe this was part of it, Aziraphale thought, these rooms, these little dark rooms. Everybody crowding up together toward a single point of light. Everybody watching up, swaying in time — the way, he couldn’t help but recall, they had used to do before the saints. 

It was rather like how, he'd sometimes thought, they had lost everything in Florence in 1427 when that incredible idiot boy Masaccio had invented perspective. He had stared at that bloody painting while it was still wet, cursing it floridly. Knowing, even then, that all was lost. Crowley was there, of course, in the plague-ridden guts of the city, sipping a fine amaro, because he didn’t dare set foot on consecrated ground back then, necessitating that Aziraphale explain to him exactly how good the bloody painting was, which was good enough to end heaven’s hegemony over the human race at least until Christ’s millennium. 

They had lost it all when art could bring the lay viewer into the very same room with god. It was not the same after that. It would not, he thought, be the same after this — after these little rooms. It would be a century of unprecedented _access_. He thought about telling Crowley this, but then the music started. 

It was very loud. The guitars sounded… crunchy. Aziraphale hadn't been able to track the exact point humans had gone in the direction of the discordant and hideous, but it had been sometime just after what they had at the time somewhat charmingly called the “Great War” and now called the “First World War.” That had been an unbelievable clusterfuck. Hard to watch, frankly. Crowley, of course, had organized the assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 which had touched the whole thing off, and sometimes Aziraphale thought he regretted it. It had kind of shocked the humans. Afterward, for a while, they acted like they had just climbed out of very cold water. All their artwork was very strange. Aziraphale felt terribly for them until they started collecting guns again. 

“Stop thinking,” Crowley shouted into his ear over the sound. 

Sometimes he wished he could take his memory out and put it somewhere else. There was just so much of it and it was always jostling. It made it awfully hard to focus. 

The song ended before he could even get a grasp of it. The crowd erupted in cheers. Onstage the players tuned their instruments. The drummer was a tiny pregnant woman who had turned her bass drum on its side to play it with mallets like a snare. The rest of the band launched into the next tune before she had quite finished tightening the heads, necessitating she jump in just behind the beat — like the great soul singers did — with a delightful abruptness. The singer’s voice was emotive and yearning and the New York accent perceptible even through his stylistic yowls. The crowd shouted along with the chorus, which was just the words _Sweet Jane_. Even Crowley, who notoriously could not sing. Aziraphale began to mentally fold this group participation phenomenon into his burgeoning theory of the ‘century of access’ but then found he was continually distracted from rational consideration by the profound goodness of the song. He was fascinated by its movement, which was graceful and serpentine. It flowed out of itself and back into itself, like the best symphonies of the eighteenth century, except louder, and with prettiness disqualified as a virtue. The prettiness was incidental, or it was trying very hard to be read as incidental. An accident of prettiness. Perhaps that too would come to characterize the century. 

This time when the chorus rolled around Aziraphale shouted _Sweet Jane_ with Crowley and the rest of the crowd. Just once — then he realized what he was doing. But Crowley had seen him. He turned his face away just so to hide the smirk. As though Aziraphale couldn’t read the smirk on any angle of his face, having been observing it for literal eons. 

“Do you ever think maybe you’re doing something good,” he said into Crowley’s exposed ear. The hair — god! The hair was too much. It was very soft where it touched Aziraphale’s nose. And against Crowley’s neck, where a few strands had adhered to very fine stubble, invisible unless one was so close. This close the smell was more lavender than patchouli. Though certainly not without cannabis. And something else, like ash, or shadows. Burned-over places. It was difficult to explain what happened then, though it had happened before, once or twice, over the years. It was a kind of light which turned on inside. A light different from the normal light, in that it was more… red. “Do you ever think,” Aziraphale went on, nearly shouting over the music; they were very close in the packed-tight room, and Crowley’s shoulder was pressed into his chest, “perhaps you're doing a good deed, perhaps this is part of — god’s ineffable plan?” 

Crowley seemed to consider for a moment, or at least his eyebrows suggested he was considering. Possibly he had already thought of this. “The heroin is definitely not part of her plan,” he shouted into Aziraphale’s ear. “I don't know. Maybe the rest of it is.” 

“But aren’t you worried — doesn't that mean — well. Your boss — ” 

“Do you have to worry about everything all the time?” 

Perhaps the most ridiculous question he had ever asked. In six thousand years. “Yes!” Aziraphale shouted. 

“Stop it for ten minutes and watch the fucking band. Please. Then we can talk about my boss.” 

He realized he was straining for a glimpse of Crowley’s eyes through the sunglasses and at this rate would give himself a migraine. So he turned back toward the band again. 

“Come get a coffee with me after this,” Crowley said, “I know a place.” 

Aziraphale said “All right,” but probably Crowley didn’t hear it over the music. 

“What did they send you here to do anyway?” 

Aziraphale twisted again to get his mouth to Crowley’s ear. The person behind them coughed pointedly. “To stop you from doing — whatever it is you’re doing. As always. Obviously.” 

“But you won’t,” Crowley said. He looked at the band, and then at Aziraphale. He almost looked worried. “Will you?” 

The song ended, and the crowd erupted in cheers again. He was going to say something. Not even necessarily sure what it was. But then — the most beautiful sound. Bewilderingly strange guitars. He put his hand to Crowley’s shoulder and turned away toward the stage again. Another man had stepped forward to sing: “Can I have your autograph…” 

The crowd, having been dancing and laughing and clutching and holding one another to the tune of the previous number, had gone quite still now. It had been like this watching the Rite of Spring. The fine yellow-red gaslight and the shadows upon the crowd — the light in the upturned blindsided faces, catching the delicate play of emotion. Around him, the people’s eyes were closed, lids and brows shuttering, lips just parted, as though they were all asleep and dreaming. Occasionally something — as some memory, some vision — would seize them, and they would appear very fragile. And then it would move on again, like a storm. 

Beside him Crowley’s face emerged from the concealing curtain of his hair. Just the sharp edge of the jaw slipping out of all the red tangles. In his brow the sign he was recalling some terrible secret. As the man on stage sang his mouth moved along: “I’ll come running to you, honey when you want me — ” 

The light was thick and heavy, like a font of baptismal water. It had sentient form. The entire room was light. Aziraphale’s heart leapt, even higher than it had heretofore been leaping, and it took him a moment to realize it was not god. God was not here. Something else was here. The entire band had leant toward the two shrieking microphones on stage to shout, “Something’s got a hold on me, and I don’t know what.” Aziraphale, of course, did know what, but couldn’t necessarily articulate it, given that articulation, even simply mental articulation, would qualify him for discorporation or worse if the corner office ever found out. And yet he felt it, like a tether, which connected him to this world, to this — whatever, beside him, who had wrapped his arms around himself so as to sway his entire snakelike body with the tune of the music and the will of the crowd with maximal abandon. 

The song broke, shattered, shambled back together into something new. Aziraphale might’ve floated off his feet. The crowd had found their voices again and the room was full of certainty. “It’s the beginning,” they shouted, drowning out the band, “of a new age — ” 

He felt something powerfully good. Just a single searing, delicious moment in which time changed the nature of its movement. I want it, he thought, before he could stop himself. Let it come. 

The elation lasted a single eternal breath before it all turned black and the fear poured in. 

“It’s the beginning,” shouted the crowd, shouted the band, shouted Crowley, who had thrown his arms in the air, “of a new age — ” 

Aziraphale turned heel and shoved his way through the masses toward the door, the way he had struggled back from the front lines of any number of wars, any number of riots, any number of sermons on mounts, crucifixions, guillotinings, displays of human cruelty and suffering, displays of human brilliance and aptitude, displays of heavenly intervention, coronations of popes and kings, beheadings of popes and kings, gallery openings and first ascents and impassioned soliloquies of the glorious and the demonic alike — any number of human behaviors influenced and uninfluenced and only casually influenced in order to add a grain of sand to one side of the scale or another. The way one backed away when the deed was done, whatever sort of deed it was, and went to find high ground to watch how it would all play out. 

Outside on the street the heat of the long-faded day had not quite gone out of the concrete. His ears were ringing. He walked briskly around the block until the light extinguished itself. 

**Author's Note:**

> this story is named after and mostly based on and inspired by the velvet underground's ["new age"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_0hjyO6fFk). i wrote most of this on the subway whilst listening to VU's loaded. i will also hype another very serious a&c song from this musical era, ["venus"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f3d5ZdE4vY) by television. i haven't read the book, so this is based on show canon - forgive me if anything doesn't quite mesh.


End file.
